The Cloven Foot by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

There was excitement and agitation in Cibber Street, Leicester Square, that essentially dramatic, musical, and terpsichorean nook in the great forest of London. La Chicot had narrowly escaped death. It had been all but death at the moment of the accident. It might be absolute death at any hour of the night and day that followed the catastrophe. At least this is what the inhabitants of Cibber Street told each other, and they were one and all as graphic and as full of detail as if they had just left La Chicot's bedside.

‘She has never stirred since they laid her in her bed,' said the shoemaker's wife, at the dingy shop for ladies' boots, two doors from the Chicot domicile; ‘she lies there like a piece of waxwork, pore thing, and every five minutes they takes and wets her lips with a feather dipped in brandy; and sometimes she says "more, more," very weak and pitiful!'